Free Republic

WASHINGTON -- If U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham wants to know why his foreign aid bill has stalled in the Senate, he need only look in the direction of the junior senator from South Carolina. In an extraordinary clash between Republican senators from the same state, U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint forced Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to postpone consideration this week of a $53.3 billion foreign aid bill, backed by Graham. DeMint demanded the bill be debated by itself and not combined with other spending measures. “I respect and work well with Lindsey, and I share his goal to secure our...

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said that the Tea Party needs to commit to being problem-solvers in the new Congress. On "Face the Nation," Graham was asked about the prospects for bipartisanship come January. "The House is in revolt," he said of the difficulty of extending the Bush-era tax cuts. "People are pissed off in the House at the estate tax. That's going to carry over a bit." Graham said that big government and spending is on the "run and retreat," but that the coming months will test the grass-roots movement that helped turn the tide in the midterm election. "The...

"One thing I think we ought to do, other than blocking his agenda and controlling spending, is trying to solve a hard problem like Social Security, and if we show our willingness to work with him on that, I think that would be well-received by the American people," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told WVOC-AM.

Lindsey Graham was sitting in a sedan early one morning and contentedly discussing the various fellow S.C. conservatives who dislike him — Tea Partiers, Constitutionalists, immigration hardliners — when Van Cato, his Upstate regional director, lifted a hand from the steering wheel and said: “That’s the leader of them right there. There’s his sign. He’s running for Greenville County Council.” “Harry Kibler,” Graham, South Carolina’s senior U.S. senator, murmured as he read the campaign poster. “He’s the one that has that prop of your legs sticking out of a toilet in the back of his truck,” Cato added helpfully. Graham...

(snip) But Graham has heard it all before. "What drives my train," he told me when I reached him late in the week, "is not their approval; it's getting it right." The fact that such a sentiment makes Graham an oddball in the Republican Party, and to some extent Congress generally, says less about him than about his colleagues. For all his supposed heresies -- on climate change, judicial nominees, immigration and now his offer to help close the Guantanamo Bay prison -- Graham had a 2009 rating of 88 percent from the American Conservative Union and a lifetime rating...